I've found that making loops in AP to be rather cumbersome and unfriendly

perhaps I'm used to Peak but I keep wishing there was a way to do the following:

-select an area of a sound file
-hit a key combo placing loop markers at the front and end of the selection
-hit the space bar
-then be able to click anywhere in the selected loop and play from that point as the file plays back
(this is so I can quickly check my loop points in a long file)

I find myself launching Peak to do this relatively simple task
rather than finding a similar workflow in AP